If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Happiness for everyone, Creative Assembly gets Warhammer license.

SEGA of America, Inc. and SEGA Europe Ltd. today announced that Creative Assembly™, award-winning creator of the Total War™ series, and SEGA Group have entered into a multi-title licensing deal with Games Workshop to create videogames based in the Warhammer universe of fantasy battles. A new high-calibre development team has been set up at Creative Assembly’s UK studio to work alongside the existing Total War, Alien IP and Mobile teams on the first Warhammer title in the deal, scheduled to launch from beyond 2013.

Really amazing news, I mean it's pretty much a license to print money. It will be interesting to see how they can differentiate it from Total War. I really hope they use the Total War battle engine so we can get some epic scale rather than the smaller squad based stuff in Dawn of War, but then they will have to do something different for the strategy side? Or maybe they will just take out the turn based aspect and make everything real time in the battle engine.

I think it'll be in the total war vein, though with some big tweaks to balance just how differently the races play, and I really hope you can set custom colour schemes for your armies because that was one of my favourite things about the tabletop game as a kid, making your army truly yours.

The only thing I'm concerned about is the number of races/units that would be available in the vanilla game. I'm not a fan of the way the last few total war games have started having DLC units, and the sheer amount of different races and units in warhammer lends itself to that model a little too well. I don't want to start the game up and find out that I can't play as lizardmen at all unless I pay an extra £5, or that dwarf armies only have 3 units unless you buy the 'elite dwarf' pack.

On the one hand, I do look forward to a Total War game that isn't pseudo-historical.

On the other hand, this reminds me of back when we DID get regular Warhammer games... and Blizzard took over the RTS market because THEIR games had "heart" while the competitors were "faithful to the ruleset".

Don't get me wrong, I like Total War. It is a pseudo-4x game with fun tactical battles. But there is no real "heart" to it as it were. Sort of like comparing Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander to Dawn of War. Both have their advantages and I enjoy both, but I actually enjoy WATCHING the latter.

Ah well, probably net good.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

Let's have it old school - Mercenary Commander Morgan Bernhardt returns with a host of customisable unique units which can suffer perm death, journeying all across the Old World through multiple paths to counter a new threat to the Empire. Environments and units are colourful in this dream story-driven strategy, where the problem isn't completing the mission so much as completing the mission with the majority of your army left intact! Also, I'd finally like to be able to touch my own money, fucking paymaster Dietrich.

Well, a man can dream. I'd be happy with a Total War style Warhammer game too I guess.

We don't even know what kinda of game they will even make out of this. Don't get to excited yet. 80% of their work is Total War, but who knows what SEGA may ask (or if they want something on console also.) Thinking about it, Wii U would be a interesting platform to put Total War on.

On the other hand, this reminds me of back when we DID get regular Warhammer games... and Blizzard took over the RTS market because THEIR games had "heart" while the competitors were "faithful to the ruleset".

Isn't one of the biggest complaints about WH, FB and 40k, the fact that the ruleset is frequently quite unbalanced and that they're always focusing too much on the flavor of the month army rather than the ones that actually need it when it comes to updating rules? In that case I'd be begging for the game that had heart over the game that was faithful to the ruleset. It's why I've never quite understood the appeal of split rulebooks for each individual thing rather than one core rulebook that provides all the rules needed to play. I mean, it's one thing to release additional books that expand on a segment but stay in-line with what already exists, like most tabletop RPG books. It's another to release a new book which supersedes everything else, but only applies to that single segment. Which is the way that GW does theirs.

Anyways, I'm kinda-sorta looking forward to this. I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Total War series, and I've always found WH interesting as a game(minus the stated issues with the way rules are handled) but have been kept away by both the price of amassing an army and the lack of available playmates. If they can create a game that semi-accurately portrays the WH games, while actually having fairly balanced play, it might just be the thing to really let me wet my whistle. DoW1 and its expansions were fun, but I just didn't think they represented actual WH40k tabletop at all. It was more "Standard RTS with WH40k trappings" than "WH40k on PC." I'm hoping that this gets closer to the latter.

Isn't one of the biggest complaints about WH, FB and 40k, the fact that the ruleset is frequently quite unbalanced and that they're always focusing too much on the flavor of the month army rather than the ones that actually need it when it comes to updating rules? In that case I'd be begging for the game that had heart over the game that was faithful to the ruleset. It's why I've never quite understood the appeal of split rulebooks for each individual thing rather than one core rulebook that provides all the rules needed to play. I mean, it's one thing to release additional books that expand on a segment but stay in-line with what already exists, like most tabletop RPG books. It's another to release a new book which supersedes everything else, but only applies to that single segment. Which is the way that GW does theirs.

Anyways, I'm kinda-sorta looking forward to this. I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Total War series, and I've always found WH interesting as a game(minus the stated issues with the way rules are handled) but have been kept away by both the price of amassing an army and the lack of available playmates. If they can create a game that semi-accurately portrays the WH games, while actually having fairly balanced play, it might just be the thing to really let me wet my whistle. DoW1 and its expansions were fun, but I just didn't think they represented actual WH40k tabletop at all. It was more "Standard RTS with WH40k trappings" than "WH40k on PC." I'm hoping that this gets closer to the latter.

DISCLAIMER: My interest in 40k and FB is limited to buying a few miniatures (mostly to paint as art and/or D&D/GURPS/Pathfinder miniatures) and reading fluff

My understanding is that the seperate rulebooks are more to provide fluff and specific unit details of each of the armies. So the core rulebook is enough to play against anyone, but if you want to be a Space Marines player you probably want the SM book, if only to know how to either make your own Chapter or which Chapter you want (for their bonuses). So theoretically, someone could play a super generic Eldar or SM army without the associated books, but they would be stupid :p

It makes sense to a degree. If they put EVERYTHING in one book, it would be obscene. But yeah, it is also moneygrubbing.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

My understanding is that the seperate rulebooks are more to provide fluff and specific unit details of each of the armies. So the core rulebook is enough to play against anyone, but if you want to be a Space Marines player you probably want the SM book, if only to know how to either make your own Chapter or which Chapter you want (for their bonuses).

This is kind of wrong. Thats how it used to work, up until 3rd (?) edition 40k. Those days you got the army list for every faction in the main rulebook. Since then the main rule book does not come with any army lists, it just has the core mechanics of the game. So you absolutely have to get the individual army books (called a codex) in order to play with that army. Without it you don't know the special rules associated with your army, what weapons and stuff your allowed in each unit, and how many points each unit costs. Thats how its been for the last 5 years atleast, I'm not sure how exactly Fantasy Warhammer works but I think it's the same.

This is kind of wrong. Thats how it used to work, up until 3rd (?) edition 40k. Those days you got the army list for every faction in the main rulebook. Since then the main rule book does not come with any army lists, it just has the core mechanics of the game. So you absolutely have to get the individual army books (called a codex) in order to play with that army. Without it you don't know the special rules associated with your army, what weapons and stuff your allowed in each unit, and how many points each unit costs. Thats how its been for the last 5 years atleast, I'm not sure how exactly Fantasy Warhammer works but I think it's the same.

You are correct. The big rule books will have reference tables for all the factions available at the time of print, so you can check what the toughness is of a dwarf warrior, but if you wan't to know the point cost, extra abilties, unit sizes etc, you must own the codex (40K) or army book (fantasy).

Apart from using the names and likenesses for factions I don't see them getting bogged down in the rules. Dawn of War (I know different company) had very little resemblance to the rules. It had enough, such as X unit was good in close combat, Y unit had better range and you can only have Z of this type of unit (that was rare though).

Yeah. I think that is why Dawn of War did so well. It was a solid RTS (maybe not "competitive" solid, but it had the fundamentals and tried new things) while playing up the actual FUN of the setting.

I forget the name, but there was a semi-recent (a few years back) Warhammer FB RTS (mark of chaos?) that pretty much sums up my thoughts on this. It had definitely learned from DoW and even had RPG-esque development of your hero units. But it just felt "meh" and was basically "smash armies together" which has been a long standing complaint I have had of Total War. Yes, you have a crapton of strategy and what not, but it still boils down to something that might as well be a top-down view and a bunch of glowing dots.

But yeah. Wasn't aware GW had gotten that bad.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

Mark of Chaos was one of those odd games where you know that the designers knew that its predecessor (Dark Omen) was a good game but had no clue why it was a good game. There was one thing that it did do really well: it was a wargame with a campaign mode in which losing loads of soldiers in a battle was something you could recover from. So you could actually have battles between fairly evenly matched armies. The Chaos campaign on Hard was actually rather good, but more by luck than judgement I felt.

I'd love a video game that followed the tabletop wargame rules more closely (I started life as a wargamer and moved into video gaming more for practical reasons rather than gameplay ones) but obviously it won't happen. I do think that video wargames like Total War would be better if they were more gamey though. As gundato says, you usually just end up splattering people together in a big melee. That doesn't happen in a tabletop game like Warhammer, because the rules are more gamey and less simulationy.

You should look around at GW specific sites someday for laughs when you see how much rage they generate. A particular favourite was when they went from metal to resin and suddenly a box of five knights cost $100.

There is a mod for DoW that enforces the rules of 40k into the game, but the issue there is it makes some things too good. There's no default map that the imperial guard cant sit 3 basilisks in their base and shell anywhere else on the map constantly.

Apart from using the names and likenesses for factions I don't see them getting bogged down in the rules. Dawn of War (I know different company) had very little resemblance to the rules. It had enough, such as X unit was good in close combat, Y unit had better range and you can only have Z of this type of unit (that was rare though).

I agree. For the most part Shogun 2 is pretty bloody well balanced. For those who don't know each unit has a set of attributes, such as: melee attack, melee defence, armour, speed, morale, range, reload speed, bonus vs. cavalry, charge bonus. CA should be able to broadly correlate these to the Warhammer attributes, like strength and toughness etc.

Shogun 2 had the whole rock, paper, scissors thing going on. Archers > melee troops (no shields in Sengoku period!) > spear troops > cavalry > archers. They should be able to adapt Warhammer to this quite nicely. Say a group of Bloodletters will destroy other infantry, but they'll get mowed down by archers or cavalry. Likewise a group of dwarf Ironbreakers would be more like Shogun's naginata troops: real tanky and resistant to archers, but slow to move and not as specialised as other melee troops.